MSc thesis proposal abroad (in collaboration with University of Oklahoma) Title of the research Modeling the Competing Diffusion of Information vs Disinformation and Resulting Infrastructure Impacts Objectives of the research Recent well-publicized disinformation campaigns have increased awareness among researchers that historical problems of mis-/disinformation exacerbated due to the wide availability and utilization of online platforms Disinformation influences public trust in institutions and willingness to adopt their recommendations However, an understudied problem is how emergent networks of disinformation could lead to misuse of critical infrastructure systems, leading to wide spread and complex adverse impacts Disinformation can be weaponized to disrupt cyber-physical systems and networks, which requires effective coordination between interdependent human information and physical layers This weaponization of disinformation motivates our work in studying attacks in the information layer that, through emergent human interactions, leads to a disruption in the physical layer Addressing this issue reimagines (i) an information layer being formed from social media and (ii) a disinformation attack that causes human responses (i.e., communication on social media) that adversely alter performance in the physical layer This project deals with how individuals exchange information to ultimately influence others, where influence is defined as an action “to induce a change in behavior of another that conforms to the influencing actor's desires.” Each individual communicates with (or influences) many other peers, and likewise, individuals are influenced by numerous other peers An analogy to the spread of influence is the spread of diseases found in epidemiology literature, a basic model for which is the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model, which uses a series of differential equations to describe the membership of different states at a point in time: those who are susceptible to the disease, those who are infected by it, and those who have recovered from it Numerous variations on the basic SIR model have been proposed Little explored, however, is the competitive nature to describe the spread of information versus disinformation We propose to answer questions like “how can existing models of diffusion be adapted to represent competing spread agents?”, “how can competing forces of information and disinformation effectively spread in an information layer?”, and “what are properties of such a layer and agents in that layer that would enable the spread of information relative to disinformation?” The information layer is ultimately related to the physical layer, so we also want to understand the resulting physical manifestation of the effective spread of disinformation Kash Barker, Ph.D and Andres D Gonzalez, Ph.D School of Industrial and Systems Engineering University of Oklahoma, USA kashbarker@ou.edu Enrico Zio, Ph.D Dipartimento di Energia Politecnico di Milano enrico.zio@polimi.it For further information, please contact: Enrico Zio, enrico.zio@polimi.it